Initially, Jaech anticipates selling to homeowners, possibly with incentives from insurers.
High-end insurers already have programs to reduce premiums by up to 13% for the installation of water-leak detection systems, Jaech says. Today, those systems are usually custom affairs costing thousands of dollars. “There’s very low penetration because of the hassle involved in getting that done,” he says.
Despite the hassle, the economics at the high-end of the market make sense. But a $10,000 home hazard detection system doesn’t pencil out for the bulk of the market, where insurance premiums are around $1,000 a year, Jaech says.
“Our price point has to be in the low hundreds, and it has to be homeowner-installed so that there’s no professional fees associated with installing it,” he says, comparing it to the consumer-friendly Nest smart thermostat and Dropcam home video cameras.
Jaech says SNUPI hopes to have test units in the field this summer and a commercial product ready in about a year. The company would raise additional funding to scale up manufacturing and market the product.
The company had been going by the name WatchFrog, but problems with obtaining a Web domain name, and other products and companies with similar names prompted the switch to SNUPI Technologies—coined while the technology was being developed in Patel’s lab, Jaech says.
He is confident that an arrangement could be reached with Peanuts LLC if necessary.
Jaech is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded desktop publishing pioneer Aldus and visual work-plan company Visio (acquired by Microsoft), and has led startup companies and the Tech Alliance. He is also the newest member of the UW Board of Regents.
After leaving IT energy management software maker Verdiem in 2011, Jaech hung around the UW computer science department, meeting with professors, taking a couple of classes, “just trying to see what’s going on,” he says.
In search of a “software play, probably a Web plus mobile play,” Jaech says he didn’t find a defensible business idea.
While touring Patel’s lab as part of a dinner celebrating Patel’s MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship, Jaech’s wife elbowed him and asked, “Why aren’t you working with this guy?” Because it’s hardware, he told her. She prodded him to give it a shot anyway.
Patel—co-founder of Zensi, a residential energy-monitoring startup bought by Belkin in 2010—had been searching for a chief executive to take the SNUPI technology to the next level. The timing was right for both.
“So here we go,” he says.
